Doing My Best (to boogie) – FMOD / Unreal

I realise it’s been some time since I posted here (two months truth be told!) however I’ve been keeping busy working on a couple of freelance contracts. This doesn’t mean that I’ve neglected my portfolio projects (Lake Lodge / DATA Labs / Digital Dark Age) and I’ve spent some time researching and developing my knowledge of blueprints to aid in their development in my spare time.

In particular I’ve been looking into creating custom occlusion blueprints for FMOD (which I’ll get into more depth about at a later date) and some of the ways in which FMOD integrates with Unreal in a musically interesting fashion!

As you can see the text and ‘coloured blobs’ are timed to the music, or more accurately the tempo and time signature of the attached audio event in FMOD. This can be useful for a whole range of things (rhythm games in particular) although I plan on using this feature in my DATA Labs level to add some extra interest in the basement labs.

Once you’ve got the tempo / time signature info from FMOD its possible to trigger lots of different actions in Unreal. This is the blueprint for my ‘boogie demo’ above.

As you can see below the FMOD component has it’s own ‘On Timeline Beat’ event which automatically outputs information about tempo, beats, bars etc and can be used to trigger anything you like really! As my boogie loop is in 4/4 I’ve used the beat output and a switch with beats 1 – 4 to toggle visibility of the coloured blobs and boogie text render.

The ‘On Timeline Beat’ event outputs a range of useful data.

Another useful function I’ve been playing about with lately is the ‘On Event Stopped’ event that can be called from any FMOD audio component. The screenshot below is taken from my DATA Labs level where I’m using it to turn off a cassette player once the recording on the tape has reached it’s end. (I’ll be posting about this soon as well!)

This is really only just scratching the surface of what you can achieve when combining the functionality of FMOD and Unreal in blueprints, but I hope it highlights a couple of ideas and provides some inspiration for your own projects. If you’ve got any questions etc please feel free to drop me a message over on Twitter.